"We live amazing times! Our world, our day-to-day lives, how we communicate and interact have dramatically changed within the last decades. Access to an almost surreal amount of information is at a swipe of a finger. And all of it is possible because of mind blowing technological and informational progress, at the heart of which stands DATA. And because everything happens somewhere or in a spatial relation with something, the geospatial dimension opens anew analysis and visualization opportunities. Schuyler Erle said years ago ”You are awesome, your software is awesome, (but) your software is useless, …without data.” Our great challenge today lies in our capability of extracting meaningful information from all the (geo)data resources flooding our world.

We are convinced that open source is the solution and, thus, FOSS4G 2019 is dedicated to enable an asymptotic connection between SOFTWARE and DATA."

What is FOSS4G ?

“Over the years, FOSS4G progressed following closely the developments of the open source solutions for geospatial data management, processing and visualization, increasing from 450 participants in 2006 to over 1000 in 2017 and 2018. Due to the pervasiveness of geospatial data usage and the constant advancement of the Geospatial Information solutions that do not require highly technical end users, FOSS4G has gradually opened up to include domain knowledge and user experience talks and workshops. A natural expansion of the once high tech event, today FOSS4G brings together for one week a wide range of professionals working in any district of the Geospatial Information, as developers, data scientists, domain experts, in the private, academic or public sector.

There is a strong commitment at FOSS4G 2019 Bucharest to give focus on DATA management and data processing in a global context, strongly influenced by rising ways of collecting geo-enabled information, like Copernicus and other very successful space programs. Concepts like Big Data, Open Data, Data Cubes, Digital Economy, High Performance Computing, Cloud Based Technology, Exploitation Platforms are today common language in the geospatial world and we strongly believe that the FOSS4G community can significantly contribute to make them reality. In this direction we are organizing the FOSS4G EO Data Challenge. Through FOSS4G EO Data Challenge, we are challenging startups, open source developers, students and researchers to come up with something useful, valuable or interesting using large volumes of EO data.

Bucharest event benefits from a strategic partnership with the Romanian Space Agency and we already have agreements with important institutional partners such European Commission through DG Grow (Copernicus Programme), the European Space Agency, United Nations Open GIS, Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) for specific activities.”